Friday, October 23, 2009

For the moment this seems to be the easiest solution, since we already have a QNAP TS-439 NAS hooked up in our network.

What our QNAP currently does:

Hosts 2TB of storage

Hosts all our media (pictures, movies, music, documents)

Shares a USB printer over the network

UPnP connection to PS3 (for our movie viewing pleasure)

iTunes Server

We also rigged our new house with speaker wires and cat5e cables for a future multisource/multiroom solution (NuVo Essentia). A Squeezebox can be hooked up as a source if needed. It comes with a wireless remote, LCD included, to select songs and playlists.

Another good thing is that the Logitech Squeezecenter (formerly known as SlimServer) is opensource. There are opensource clients available for nearly all platforms, check out SoftSqueeze for example, their site lists other clients as well.

I also found some Java code that demonstrates how to connect to the music server. Maybe my next Android project? ;-)

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

[Update] A new version for Qbus3 is available on the Android Market (link)

This is the first public release candidate of Qbus Remote. To install it, see links below.

New features include error handling (you now should have a clue of why things go wrong) and a better layout (button size is fixed, more spacing and the labels are bigger). Languages include English and Dutch.

Thursday, October 15, 2009

So I've been using my new HTC Magic phone for 12 days now, and I'm liking it more every day. The platform is quite young compared to other mobile platforms. Android Donut (v1.6) was released earlier this month, and now the people at Google are gearing up for Eclair.

And today I discovered I can actually debug my application on my HTC Magic device through its USB cable. Just plug it in, install the ADB USB-driver (from the Android SDK), launch Eclipse and start the application on the device. From Eclipse you can connect to the application that's running on your device, but make sure that it was built with the debug option enabled, otherwise it won't show up in Eclipse.

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Alright.. this little Android project is coming along better then expected.

The latest version is able to refresh the controls from the Qbus Ethernet Control Table (or whatever it's called). It parses the response (and I must add that the stuff that is returned is very awkward) and builds the control list.

I also added a Settings screen where you should enter the ETH01 controller's address and port.

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

I always thought that Linksys was a good brand for network devices since it is a division of Cisco and all. But I recently started doubting that.

My first WRT54G v1.0 router's power adapter died some year ago (at that time I thought the router died, so I bought a new one). Until yesterday I've been unable to find a simple replacement adapter. I called Linksys, they send me to a retailer and the retailer said that Linksys didn't sell seperate power adapters (that's customer support).

Yesterday I finally ordered a replacement adapter through e-bay from a store in Hong Kong.

Why all this trouble you say? Well, I'm using a second WRT54G v5.1 ever since and I recently came to the conclusion that the official firmware SUCKS! Not only did it take Linksys 10+ months to fix a UPnP bug, the subnets you can choose from are limited and once in a while our internet connection drops and we have to powercycle the router in order to get back online.

So, when the new power adapter arrives, my v1.0 router is going to be DD-WRTinized!

Friday, October 9, 2009

Now I have to clean it up (can't believe how rusty my java skills are, it's been a while), include the code to parse the controls from the ETH01 control panel so you can always refresh to get the latest configuration.

To optimize it I'll have to persist the control configuration in a DB, and include the possibility to add some categories ("light", "curtains", etc) so that the controls can be grouped if needed.